Leaderboard

I know it was mentioned that performance tweaks would be coming after some other priorities were taken care of. I'm just going to mention a few things I've noticed. In the manual, it says there is virtually no performance difference between the 4 and 5 blade propeller variants. After several flights with both, the 5 blade variant is about 20 knots slower. Standard temperature and pressure at 22,000', I get 271 ktas with the 4 blade and 252 ktas with the 5 blade. More blades should theoretically increase takeoff and climb performance at the cost of a few knots cruise speed. Definitely shouldn't be 20 knots slower. Also, both of those cruise figures are way too slow for the MU-2B-60. The dash 60 variant is supposed to be a nearly 300 knot airplane. Cruise speed should be in the 280-300 ktas range depending on altitude, temperature, etc. Final observation is that pulling the condition lever back to 96% rpm at cruising altitude causes ITT to increase. ITT is usually already near redline at that point with the power levers at maximum - resulting in about 60% torque at 22,000'. Coming back to 96% rpm puts ITT over redline. Meaning, you can actually cruise faster at 100% rpm because you can run higher torque. Not sure if that is realistic behavior or not. Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with this plane. It has quickly become my new favorite. Thanks for all the hard work and dedication in creating this gem.

Just a developer commentary to any who may also read this. CaptCrash did discuss these with me and I am happy he is looking at the performance and I am also keen to improve the performance numbers; however, the relative work (relative to everything else required to be done to get 95% of the customers happy) ... to get the last 15% of performance accuracy is such that I have always found it best to do those final refinement tweaks last, after everything else is working. This is generally because the final performance tweaks can be made quite quickly....with all due respect to the FLIGHT TESTING...which is not very quick though. As soon as the obvious issues slow down, I'll will take a deep breath and start on the fun stuff, which includes performance. Call it.."round 2" of V2 work! -TK